management – Chanters Lodge Livingstone

Management Offices, Chanters Lodge, Livingstone

The new executive office suite at Chanters Lodge, Livingstone is finished and only has to be furnished. There are pictures of the outside, the new curtains and the ‘curtain ladies’ above. The suite comprises two offices, one for the ‘director’ and one for the assistant manager (eventually manager) and a lou. I’ve often been asked why we’re spending so much money building apparently non-revenue earning rooms – well, there’s method in our madness.

Two of the original ‘main house’ bedrooms are small and one is currently used as an office (except in ’emergencies’). In the early development of the lodge we never got round to making an office, and only lately has the need become more evident. The plan is to convert these two original main house rooms into a suite with a pool facing sitting room, a large double bedroom, and a totally renovated bathroom with the installation of a new bathroom suite and seperate shower.

Why? Well, pool facing rooms are our most popular accommodation, and with our current room rates we’ll be able to let the suite for a total of what we can now earn from the two existing small rooms – when they’re let – which isn’t very often. In addition, we’ll have a suite suitable for VIP’s which we should be able to let for much more when it’s requested, and if there’s a demand for long term accommodation, which there often seems to be, the new suite would also be suitable.

Apart from the bathroom renovation which we want to begin next week, to finish the suite we only have to knock down three walls, raise a roof, relocate all the satellite dishes, install new entrance steps and a new front door from the poolside. Then, fit a pool facing picture window in the existing external wall and build a new dividing wall between the sitting room and bedroom incorporating a fitted wardrobe!

Oh! And the suite won’t be cheap to furnish either!

A very Happy Easter to you all!

4
APR

accommodation, Africa, Chanters, innovation, management, victoriafalls, Zambia

Leadership

I liked this article from Inc Magazine on what they call The New Rules of Leadership. I’ve edited a lot of it, left and commented on just seven I feel to be the most relevant for us at Chanters Lodge, Livingstone:

1. Have a Bias Towards Action
Before Josh James founded online analytics company Omniture, he carried around an idea book, and jotted down ideas every day. He ended up with a patent on a product: a hair-in-hairbrush remover he dubbed Brush’s Groom. It never made a cent, but the process taught him about creating a business plan, marketing, and distribution.

Chanters
Where would we be without our ‘to do list’ and handover book?

2. Keep Communications to a Minimum
Joel Spolsky, founder and CEO of Fog Creek Software in New York City, asks: When was the last time you scheduled a meeting and invited eight people instead of the three people who really needed to be there? When did you send a non-consequential company-wide email? These are symptoms of a common ailment that Spolsky dubs too much communication.

Chanters
I realised some time ago the best way to communicate here is to write a few lines about what I think on the bottom of the bi-weekly food percentage calculation placed on a table in the kitchen. Everyone reads it!

3. Motivate Employees Through Volunteerism
When your company is booming, but your employees are service-industry workers who can’t be paid too much in reward, what do you do? Amy Simmons, founder of Amy’s Ice Cream in Austin, Texas, gets her workers involved in the impact her company has on the community. She brings employees to hospital volunteer days and lets them choose which charities Amy’s Ice Cream supports. Pretty sweet.

Chanters
I think this is a cracking idea and feel we should be doing more for the community.

4. Make Customer Service Everyone’s Job
Anytime anyone writes an e-mail to Kayak, the travel search engine Paul English founded with Steve Hafner in 2004, they get a personal response. And a phone call? English will jump over desks to answer it. Indeed every employee, from an office assistant to a web developer, is expected to do the same.

Chanters
Gosh yes! Of course it is!

5. Leave Your Schedule Open Agility is the key to productivity for Scott Lang, the CEO of Silver Spring Network, a Redwood City, California-based developer of smart energy grids. He leaves large blocks of his schedule open, such that on an average day, he’s only 50 percent scheduled. That way, he’s open to impromptu meetings, such as if an important new partner’s CEO drops by (that happened one open afternoon). And, if he winds up with extra time, he fills it with self-education and big-picture, future-oriented thinking.

Chanters
Not always easy, but another goal of mine.

6. Don’t Treat All Employees Equally
Cutrone, founder of Manhattan PR firm People’s Revolution, describes her office as a research and development lab for the “ultimate power chicks.” That said, each employee comes with different skill sets and character defects, she says, so she doesn’t treat any of her employees the same. “We’re talking all day long about our lives, our fears, what’s happening, our clients, it’s a very creative place,” she says.

Chanters
I like this one

7. Work Weekends, and Love It
For Seth Priebatsch, CEO of SCVNGR, a Boston-based start-up that helps organizations engage people through location-based smartphone games, weekends are not only fair game, but also are highly productive. When he has a particularly difficult problem to solve, he likes to come in on the weekend when there’s less going on and spend a day on it. Evenings are for reading up on fresh technology. And he expects the same of his peers and potential hires. “I’ll interview people on Saturdays, late at night, early in the morning. Those are perfectly reasonable times to expect someone who is a rock star to be on top of his or her game and excited.”

Chanters
We have no choice!

The picture? Chanters Lodge team photo with Powey The Clown!

1
APR

Africa, Chanters, management, usa, Zambia

Losing Andrew Carnegie

I love Seth Godin’s blog – as you must have heard me say before! Usually brief, always to the point and generally right. Here’s a nice one from him:

Losing Andrew Carnegie (pictured above)

“Carnegie apparently said, “Take away my people, but leave my factories and soon grass will grow on the factory floors……Take away my factories, but leave my people and soon we will have a new and better factory.”

Is there a typical large corporation working today that still believes this? Most organizations now have it backwards. The factory, the infrastructure, the systems, the patents, the process, the manual… that’s king. In fact, shareholders demand it.

It turns out that success is coming from the atypical organizations, the ones that can get back to embracing irreplaceable people, the linchpins, the ones that make a difference. Anything else can be replicated cheaper by someone else.”

25
MAR

blog, management, usa

More, More, More!

Seth Godin’s title, not mine!

Seems Seth Godin doesn’t think Customers are always right! I’ve always tried to remember that the problem in not taking the Customer as always right, is that you can’t ever win an argument with a Customer – he has the last word, he can take his business elsewhere.

However I agree 100% with Seth on this:

“Some consumers are short-sighted, greedy and selfish. Extend yourself a little and they’ll want a lot.

Offer a free drink in the restaurant one night and they’re angry that it’s not there the next. The nuts in first class weren’t warm!

The challenge of winning more than your fair share of the market is that the best available strategy – providing remarkable service and an honest human connection – will be abused by a few people you work with.

You have three choices: put up with the whiners, write off everyone, or, deliberately exclude the ungrateful curs.

Firing the customers you can’t possibly please gives you the bandwidth and resources to coddle the ones that truly deserve your attention and repay you with referrals, applause and loyalty.”

Think about it!

The picture? My partner Ireen and my daughter Alexandra in January 1998 surveying the house we’d just bought to convert into a restaurant with rooms!

24
FEB

Africa, blog, Chanters, Customers, management, Zambia

The Least Or The Most You Can Do?

As usual Seth Godin talks business sense:

“One way to think about running a successful business is to figure out what the least you can do is, and do that. That’s actually what they spent most of my time at business school teaching me. No sense putting more on that pizza, sending more staff to that event, answering the phone in fewer rings… what’s the point? No sense being kind, looking people in the eye, being open or welcoming or grateful. Doing the least acceptable amount is the way to maximize short term profit.

Of course, there’s a different strategy, a crazy alternative that seems to work: do the most you can do instead of the least. Radically overdeliver.

Turns out that this is a cheap and effective marketing technique.”

Says it all really!

The picture? Oh! That’s Joan Rogers and Lawrence Zulu outside Chanters Lodge. Lawrence went out of his way recently to give Joan and her husband an excellent bicycle tour of Livingstone – not at all the least he could do!!

11
FEB

activities, Africa, blog, Canada, Chanters, guests, management, Zambia

James Cameron – New Age Entrepreneur

You can always count on the Staff Blog at Fresh Inc for some business wisdom. Check this:

“With Avatar recently becoming the highest-grossing movie of all time, Hollywood is looking to learn what it can from the mystical blue people of the Na’vi. Entrepreneurs, however, might want to look at the film’s director, James Cameron, for some business advice.

Finance blog, BloggingStocks, has an interesting post about the business lessons entrepreneurs can learn from James Cameron. In their words, “Cameron is a New Age entrepreneur–that is, combining creativity, unconventional wisdom, over-the-top optimism and good business sense.” They advise entrepreneurs to find a way to charge a premium. By making a 3D film, Cameron was able to charge 30 percent more than a regular movie ticket.

It also took Cameron 10 years to make the film, which BloggingStocks says proves that “while some entrepreneurs can make a quick fortune, this is rare. Instead, building real value takes time.”

5
FEB

art, entertainment, entrepreneurship, innovation, management, usa

Modern Procrastination (Or Mucking Around On Facebook)

I love Seth Godin’s blog – short, easy to read and always on the ball! Check this one:

Modern procrastination

The lizard brain adores a deadline that slips, an item that doesn’t ship and most of all, busywork. These represent safety, because if you don’t challenge the status quo, you can’t be made fun of, can’t fail, can’t be laughed at. And so the resistance looks for ways to appear busy while not actually doing anything. I’d like to posit that for idea workers, misusing Twitter, Facebook and various forms of digital networking are the ultimate expression of procrastination. You can be busy, very busy, forever. The more you do, the longer the queue gets. The bigger your circle, the more connections are available.

Laziness in a white collar job has nothing to do with avoiding hard physical labor. “Who wants to help me move this box!” Instead, it has to do with avoiding difficult (and apparently risky) intellectual labor.

“Honey, how was your day?”

“Oh, I was busy, incredibly busy.”

“I get that you were busy. But did you do anything important?”

Busy does not equal important. Measured doesn’t mean mattered. When the resistance pushes you to do the quick reaction, the instant message, the ‘ping-are-you-still-there’, perhaps it pays to push in precisely the opposite direction. Perhaps it’s time for the blank sheet of paper, the cancellation of a long-time money loser, the difficult conversation, the creative breakthrough…

Or you could check your email.”

Brilliant as usual!

Or perhaps more succinctly – something I saw on Facebook this morning:
Put ♥ this ♥ on ♥ your ♥ status ♥ if ♥ you ♥ are ♥ mucking ♥ around ♥ on ♥ facebook ♥ instead ♥ of ♥ getting ♥ shit ♥ done

Lol! As they say!

3
FEB

blog, facebook, management

Livingstone Hotel University?

This from the Times of Zambia:

The Hotel and Tourism Training Institute (HTTI) will next year invest US$50 million in constructing a tourism complex that will house a 150-room hotel, university and establishing a game reserve in Livingstone.

The project, which will be done in three phases, will take between three and five years to complete.
HTTI executive director, Moses Sakala said in Lusaka yesterday that Senior Chief Mukuni had availed 163 hectares of land to the project and that title deeds were still being processed. Mr Sakala, who did not state the month when construction will start, said there was no land available in Lusaka for the complex, but the chief offered traditional land in the tourist capital.

The project will be done in three phases, with phase one concentrating on putting up a road network, water facilities and electricity for easy access to the site. Phase two will focus on construction of the university, which includes administration offices, lecture rooms, computer laboratories, and student hotels, at a cost of $20 million. The last phase of the project will involve construction of the hotel and establishing a game reserve.

“Since we are a special institution, we will set up a hotel and game reserve on the site and be able to train our students in how to look after our guests and the environment,” Mr Sakala said in an interview.
The funds for the project will be raised through a consortium of local and foreign financial institutions, whose names Mr Sakala withheld as discussions were yet to be concluded.

“We have not yet started the construction works but we will start during the course of 2010 because this is a big project where we have to put up a road network, water and connect the area to power,” he said. The university will be the first in Zambia to offer degree programmes in tourism and hospitality. “Currently, the courses being offered only reach diploma level and one cannot advance to a degree programme because there is no institution offering degrees in tourism and hospitality,” he said.

Mr Sakala also said HTTI had refurbished the conference room, restaurant and acquired new laundry machines for Fairview Hotel in Lusaka, which is being expanded to add two more storeys.

My opinion? Too much, too late. The picture? Chief Mukuni riding one of his recently acquired elephants.

31
DEC

education, hotels, management

Pillars Of Wisdom

I guess these red brick pillars outside the new management offices at Chanters Lodge, Livingstone should be ‘pillars of wisdom’ but there are three and not seven!

More exciting than the new offices is our plan to convert rooms 1 and 2 into a poolside suite when the new offices are finished. More later.

29
DEC

accommodation, Africa, Chanters, management, Zambia

New Offices

You’ll see from the photo that we’ve made good progress on the construction of our new offices at Chanters Lodge, rather ahead of time! When Susan arrived for work this morning I said to her (in a harsh tone) “Report to me in my office!” “Yes Sir!” she said. Stopped, looked at me, looked at the progress on the building, laughed and went on her way!

Great stuff!

24
DEC

Chanters, infrastructure, livingstone, management, Zambia

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